Thanks again for your time.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the goals of flatiron. Is flatiron for
building webapps? Or is it a framework to support nodejs webapps
created in some other system? Or perhaps it is meant to send json data
to static html pages for client side assembly? Or perhaps I am just
hitting the project in its early stages and need to check it out again
in a few months?

It looks like it is going to take more effort and time than I have to
evaluate in its current documented/exampled state. For me at least, it
would be helpful to have a flatiron best practices webapp like a blog
(or whatever) connected to a DB using some type of json schema
equivalent /ORM/ to see how a webapp works in flatiron. In other
words, use that best practices webapp to recursively learn the
internals of flatiron. There is a lot there. A guide (webapp) would
speed things up and lead me in the right direction to speed
understanding.

I have been looking around and I can't find an example of
assembling/transforming templates into a page on the server to send to
the client. Again, expressling allowed me to do that for express (and
found I did not fall in love with it). What I have read from the blog
entries is very much what I am looking for in architecture. I just
don't see how to use it to create a web page in a scalable way.

From what I can determine so far for plates, I would need to load
template files from the file system into strings (or heaven forbid,
write the HTML into the code) to assemble into an HTML page (creating
my own caching scheme), send that string to the response stream while
writing all the headers I need for each response. Is that the case?

The unobtrusive templating approach is very appealing to me and very
important. CSS/HTMLers can create templates with example content (for
sign off before it gets to development) to be replaced at runtime
without them having to know variables or do any kind of conditionals
or looping. Development uses the example content as a guide for the
runtime content assembly/transformation. We do A LOT of web sites
ranging from simple static pages to large hierarchical group
role-based sites (e.g. state, county, school district, school, class).

fwiw,
-Rob